1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to network enabled telephony devices, for example Voice over IP Telephones, configured for providing voice messaging applications including identifying a calling party.
2. Description of the Related Art
Telephony devices have advanced to provide enhanced features for business consumers. For example, a business premises deploying a Private Branch Exchange (PBX) for intraoffice or interoffice communications utilizes telephony devices capable of receiving messages from the PBX, including a time of day string or a calling party identity string. However, proprietary PBX systems limit the availability of features that can be added to the telephony device. In addition, proprietary PBX systems typically provide voice-only services, such that text, data, or images cannot be transferred to the telephony device.
Voice over IP (VoIP) technology has evolved to provide network enabled telephony devices, for example Voice over IP telephony devices, configured for performing multiple operations that emulate a telephony device. VoIP telephony devices often include large display screens or other display capabilities, enabling new service features to be provided for a user. For example, the VoIP telephones, such as the commercially-available Cisco Telecaster 7960 IP Telephone from Cisco Systems, San Jose, Calif., includes user input and display operations. These user input and display operations enable a user to access multiple windows displaying respective applications based on soft key or hard key inputs, such as accessing a central telephone directory for retrieval of an employee's telephone number using a search query or selection from the displayed list. A user of the VoIP telephone can access one window configured displaying call status (e.g., duration of call, calling party identity), or access another window configured for displaying the central telephone directory.
Existing telephony systems, including private branch exchange systems, residential services, and VoIP systems, provide automatic number identification (ANI) signaling information that is decoded for display on the called party's telephone or associated ANI display device. These systems, however, require that a called party subscriber visually examine the display to identify the calling party: such systems are disadvantageous for visually-impaired subscribers or those that must interrupt their activities to view the display to determine whether to accept an incoming call. In addition, wireless telephones having displays are impractical for subscribers unable to divert their attention to the display, for example while operating a vehicle or performing some other manual task. Hence, subscribers often will ignore the display device altogether due to the substantial inconvenience.
Newer telephony systems, for example wireless digital PCS systems, enable a digital PCS subscriber to program his or her PCS phone to generate a distinctive ring based on the received ANI during an incoming call. In particular, the digital PCS subscriber needs to program his or her PCS phone to recognize input telephone numbers; the digital PCS subscriber then assigns to each input telephone number a corresponding selected ring from a group of available rings. This arrangement, however, requires the digital PCS subscriber to program the PCS phone to recognize the input telephone numbers, resulting in added inconvenience for the digital PCS subscriber. Moreover, this arrangement is ineffective for incoming calls having ANI values that do not match the input telephone numbers stored in the PCS phone, or if the incoming call is from a subscriber that uses a different service provider. Finally, this arrangement is useless if the subscriber needs to receive a call on an unprogrammed telephone, or if another user that does not recognize the distinctive tones borrows the subscriber's telephone.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,999,599 to Schaffer et al. discloses an arrangement where a calling party records his or her audio identifier (e.g., name) prior to making a telephone call; the recorded identification is then sent with each call the caller makes by inserting the recorded audio identifier within a new field of an SS7 signaling message. The recorded identification would then be played by the destination telephony device for announcement to the called party. Such an arrangement, however, imposes substantial bandwidth burdens on signaling networks; further, such an arrangement may be subject to abuse by anonymous callers that can record threatening messages on telephony devices that are available without subscriber identification or authorization, for example public telephones.
Other proposals for utilizing text to speech resources for generating audible forms of the ANI string, for example as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,233,325 to Frech et al. or U.S. Pat. No. 4,899,358 to Blakley, suffer from the disadvantage that substantial processing resources are expended in converting ANI strings into audible format.